Cupmarked stone, Baile An Ghlaisín, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Cupmarked stone, Baile An Ghlaisín, Co. Kerry

On the lower southern slopes of Ballynahunt mountain, three slabs carry some of the most quietly puzzling marks left by prehistoric people anywhere on the Dingle Peninsula.

Cup-marks, the shallow, roughly circular depressions pecked into rock surfaces during the Bronze Age and possibly earlier, appear here in abundance, and the site as a whole has a character that goes well beyond simple repetition of a single motif. The largest slab, lying prostrate against a field fence, measures 1.5 metres by 1.2 metres and carries at least 23 plain cup-marks alongside three cup-and-ring marks, where a carved circle surrounds the central depression. Near its north-western edge, one cup-mark sits enclosed within a carved square, its eastern side formed by a natural fissure in the rock and its southern edge by a slight natural ridge. Linear grooves divide and frame sections of the decorated surface, and one cup-mark extends into a longer radial groove, giving the composition an internal logic that is easier to observe than to explain.

A sketch made by the County Kerry Field Club in 1945 recorded circles enclosing most of the cup-marks on the main slab, but no trace of these survives today, raising the uncomfortable question of whether they were always faint, were misread by the recorder, or have since been lost to weathering. Thirty-five metres to the south, a second slab, this one cleared from the field and piled with other boulders against a fence, carries 27 cup-marks on its exposed surface. A third boulder immediately nearby bears a single possible cup-mark. In the field directly to the north, a series of small cairns, stone mounds that often mark burial sites, has apparently yielded graves, suggesting that this stretch of hillside held some ceremonial or funerary significance over a long period. The site was documented in the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage and published in 1986 under the title Corca Dhuibhne by Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne.

The slabs sit on steep, south-facing ground that opens onto views across the Anascaul valley and through gaps in the coastal hills towards Dingle Bay and the Iveragh Peninsula beyond. That orientation, and the presence of the cairn field nearby, may not be coincidental; many Irish rock art sites appear to have been positioned with careful attention to landscape and sightlines, though the precise reasoning behind such choices remains a matter of ongoing debate rather than settled interpretation.

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